Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

In the meantime, if no military aid was forthcoming and only minimal sanctions were applied to Russia, would the West at least provide generous financial support to Ukraine? Just to meet its outstanding obligations, the new government in Kiev estimated that it needed $35 billion over two years. That was not far off the estimates presented by Yanukovych’s regime six months earlier, which had been rejected out of hand. In March 2014 Kiev put in a request for $15 billion from the IMF. The Obama administration backed the appeal and sought to leverage it to break the deadlock in Congress over IMF reform. The administration linked a $1 billion loan guarantee for Ukraine that was popular with the Republican right wing to a proposal to unblock IMF funding.55 The Ukraine crisis was a clear demonstration, the White House insisted, of the IMF’s strategic importance to the